


Gets You Through

by winter_rogue



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-15
Updated: 2012-11-15
Packaged: 2017-11-18 18:24:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/564060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winter_rogue/pseuds/winter_rogue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes she dreams about fire and flames.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gets You Through

**Author's Note:**

> written for angst_bingo prompt "burns"  
> snippet of Laura character study (ish)

Sometimes she dreams about fire and flames, and the heat that licks up your bones and devours you whole. They aren’t healthy dreams, she’s always careful to hide them, tuck them away in a back corner of her head where Derek will never find them. He has enough fire in his head without hers. And she knows he’d feel guilty about hers too.  
  
She drives six thousand miles when they call her with the news; she doesn’t stop, just gets in the camaro and drives until she’s got Derek under her fingertips, alive and safe. And once they tell her Peter is stable but probably never coming back, she packs them back up into the car, what little remains of her brother’s life and drives them six thousand miles back. Derek hasn’t said a word since the fire, but he never talked a lot before it either.  
  
And her life was in New York. School and an apartment she shared with some people she met freshman year and she isn’t sure how to explain to them now “My entire family is dead, this is my teenage brother” but she does somehow and Derek spends that first year sleeping on their futon couch in the living room, badly and still not saying a lot and pretty much wallowing in guilt and self pity and misery. Misery so thick she can practically taste it wherever she goes in the apartment.  
  
There are windows everywhere in NYC. Huge storefronts made up of reflective glass and sometimes when she walks past them she doesn’t see herself. From the corner of her eye she catches a glimpse of mangled, scorched flesh and charred bone and it makes the wolf howl inside of her, raise its hackles, unsure whether to attack or flee until she looks again or looks away. And sometimes when she wakes in the middle of the night, careful always so quietly, and sneaks into the bathroom to splash ice cold water on her too hot skin, she sees nothing but burned and gnarled hands and sunken pits where her eyes should be before she shakes it off. Blinks again to see just herself, looking tired and worn out.  
  
When it gets so bad even Derek starts to notice, that’s the kick in the gut isn’t it. Because she’s the alpha now, she’s supposed to be taking care of them. They’re all each other has left and for twelve months she’s been letting them wallow and burn in their own personal hells. There’s something Derek isn’t telling her that he probably should, that she needs to pry out of him. But first she kicks him off the couch and into the local community college to finish his diploma because mom would chew her out if she could them right now.  
  
And she starts looking into every window and reflective surface that she passes until she stops seeing a burnt out husk. And sometimes when she has the dreams, full of screams and heat that she didn’t witness, only saw the fruits of afterwards, she sneaks into the living room and sits with her back against the couch listening to her brother breath. Because he’s still alive and it’s almost okay. Times passes and it’s almost okay and the dreams come less often and she stops smelling burning everywhere she goes and she’s thinking about having Uncle Peter moved out to a care facility closer to them when she gets a letter in the mail.


End file.
